The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett by David H. Hesla (review)

1972 BOOK REVIEWS 105 .or the change in dramatic literature, theatre, and politics in Communist China from 1919 to the current 'cultural revolution'" (Preface). The etditors would have fulfilled their intentions better had they devoted the entire fifteen pages to the history, development, theories, critical analysis of dramatic literature, etc., putting the rest of the material (background of the play, the author, production history. Communist reaction to the production, etc.) in the form of short introductions preceding each play. A few factual mistakes were found in the Introduction. For instances. the Chinese title for Snow in Midsummer is Tou Ngo Yuan, not Tou Ngo (p. 4); Chou Hsin-£ang was not a dramatist (p. 5) but a noted Peking opera actor, better known by his stage name Ch'i Lin T'ung. In spite of its limitations, this anthology should still be recommended to stu· dents interested in Chinese drama, literature, and theatre. The pioneering effort of Professor and Mrs. Meserve should also be recognized. DANIEL S. P. YANG University of Colorado (Now Visiting University of Hawaii) THE SHAPE OF CHAOS: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE ART OF SAMUEL BECKETT, by David H. Hesla. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. 252 pp. $9.75. David Hesla's title is somewhat misleading, since his book contains very little about either shape or chaos in Beckett's work. Rather. he examines ideas. As he says in his preface: "What I have tried to do is relate [Beckett] to the Western intellectual tradition, and get at the problems which have preoccupied Beckett as a writer and thinker.... Beckett's art ... asks the question, what is the being of that entity we call man? In asking it, he has drawn on the ideas of the preSocratics , the rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on Schopenhauer and Bergson, and that group of thinkers collected under the heading 'Existentialists.''' Whether or not Beckett drew on these philosophers, Hesla expounds them more fully than any previous Beckett critic. Hugh Kenner early sketched Beckett's affinities with Descartes and the Oq:asionalists; Richard Coe outlined· Beckett's dependence on the ancient Eleatics and on Sartre. Hesla excerpts long quotations from these and other philosophers, and he offers lucid and leisurely exegesis of these quotations. What Hesla does not do is relate these quotations specifically to most of Beckett's texts. I mean that last statement as praise. Philosophically oriented critics are too prone to fit Beckett into a Procrustean hed of a particular philosophic school. David Resia suggests parallels rather than insisting upon influences, and he is most instructive on Beckett's works that lean on philosophic conundrums. The indebtedness of the Proust monograph to Schopenhauer is convincingly set forth. In the Beckett issue of Perspective (1959) Samuel Mintz first read Murphy as a Cartesian novel, and Jacqueline Hoefer first read Watt as a Wittgensteinian novel. Hesla continues their readings in more detail, and he shows that; other philosophers hover be~ignly in the· background (Spinoza, Leibniz, Democritus, Kierl<.egaa.rd). Though Hesia has almost nothing to say of Beckett's art in Murphy and Watt, he does illuminate their substratum of ideas. With 'the trilogy: and his two rnain plays-written concurrently-Hesla runs 106 MODERN DRAMA May into trouble-or as it seems to me. Beckett has described himself as a sensibility rather than an intellectual, and I believe him to be luminous in this self.-knowledge. With his shift to the French language, Beckett shed most of his erudition, in order to impoverish himself for raw sensitivity. Perhaps Beckett's early English works ask the question, as Resla claims, "What is the being of that entity we call man?" But the French work conveys the experience of being man-a painful experience that is camouflaged by society, education, and other structures. Philosophic germs therefore seem to me to lead away from the center of the trilogy and the drama. I find these two chapters inadequate not only because Resia overstresses the relevance of philosophy, but because he misfocuses on their art. Resla reads the trilogy too closely as writing about writing; he leans too heavily on the Duthuit dialogues, ignoring the immense residue of experience in the trilogy. Conversely, I find that Resla reads the plays in terms of ideas and, occasionally, images, but he fails to visualize them on stage. Beckett's plays are about playing, which is Beckett's literal and metaphoric representation of human behavior. Only one of Resla's seven chapters deals with Beckett's drama, and the discussion is largely limited to Godot and Endgame. To the many guesses at the identity of Godot, Resla adds Time Future and "the Answer to which the being of man is the Question." Though I am not quite sure what the phrase means, I think it situates Godot in the domain of the divine, with which he has been associated since the first review. What Resla does supply is new and abundant detail as to how the Pozzo-Lucky couple derives from the Master-Slave dichotomy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. In contrast, Resla's discussion of Endgame is virtually devoid of philosophy, as he responds to the art of ending. Though I have the impression that Resla considers Endgame a lesser work than Godot, his own response belies such evaluation, and I find his few pages on Endgame the most perceptive of the book. Resla's concluding chapter is praiseworthy in hesitating to draw neat conclusions . Logically. his book should terminate on his claim that Beckett's dialectical art "is in the tradition of Democritus the Abderite ... ; of the Zetetics and Ephectics, who sought but could not find; of the Desert Fathers who lived the absurdity of both flesh and spirit; of the Augustine of the Confessions . •. ; of the Pascal caught between Nothing and the Infinite; of the Hegel who analyzed the 'Unhappy Consciousness'; of Heidegger's Dasein .•. ; of the uncompromising Sartre, who maintains his integrity by being two in one; of Kierkegaard ... for whom the negative is the way to the infinite." The bulk of the book has suggested Beckett's links to this tradition, and yet Resla realizes: "And for all its dialectical brilliance, its logical elegance, its symmetrical proportions. and its painful self-consciousness, Beckett's art is profoundly and essentially human." Human is a problematical adjective. so that I would want to stress what Hesla seems to imply-that Beckett's art conveys profound and essential human experience . At its most searching points, Beckett's art spurns such props as ideas, in order to immerse us in more elemental experience. But where Beckett still plays with ideological props, ResIa's book can be helpful. (I am not qualified to judge whether his exposition of philosophy is accurate. It it unusually lucid to this unphilosophic mind.) RUBY COHN California Institute of the Arts ...